There ought to be a law about all these earlier and earlier primary elections. If this game of "we wanna be first" keeps up soon there will be all-year elections not only for president but for every political office.

That will be chaos, mindless chaos.

Here, the primary election was moved up to August, so statewide candidates must file for office the week of June 4, not in July as in the past.

But our state Republican and the Democrat parties say voters are not important to them. What is important to the political parties is that they control who each nominates. They want to continue the outdated caucus system, gathering people in a room and making decisions they can control on who will be a candidate.

According to the Washington secretary of state's office, a caucus system allows fewer than 4 percent of all voters to make those decisions. That office, which runs state elections, said that in 2000, only an estimated 60,000 Washington voters participated in the party caucus process for president.

It is about control, folks, not about better candidates. Oh, certainly, there are a lot of high-flown phrases of party independence and the right of a body to make its own decisions. Truth is, they simply don't trust the people.

The rest of the nation is rushing madly to the primary election system, stampeding to the first weeks of 2008. It could be that nominees will be selected by mid-February.

How boring that will be. How disastrous it will be if one of the anointed candidates trips over his or her own tongue in the long, long time to the general election in November. Or, what if some major news event makes a nominee absolutely unelectable (does anyone remember Thomas Eagleton?)

We need Congress to step in after this election cycle and mandate election procedures for national elections. This cannot go on.

Instead of 16 months more of presidential election madness, the Brits do the same thing in six or so weeks. Maybe we can learn something from them.

-Jack Mayne